I am an artist and a practicing cardiologist based in Victoria, Texas. I am a proud American, and equally proud of my Indian ancestry. This background has shaped how I move between, and think through, both Western and Eastern philosophies. As an artist, I use painting, sculpture, and assemblage to investigate the unknowns of the universe, the mysteries of the cosmos.
While medicine has been a lifelong vocation, I turned to painting during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. Wanting to keep my family safe, I lived in a small house next door, and my world narrowed to two places: home and work. When I wasn’t caring for patients, I found myself confronting a different kind of urgency: the need to create.
That impulse led me back to a personal loss. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey destroyed my family’s home near Rockport, Texas. During the pandemic, when travel was impossible and the place itself no longer existed as I remembered it, I realized I could return to my old home through painting. If I could not go back, I would reconstruct it through memory, imagination, and feeling. Painting became a way of rebuilding what had been lost.
My practice draws from years of observation, both as a physician and as a lifelong student of history and science. These interests reach back to my childhood and inform how I see and interpret the world. I project my imagination and my understanding of reality onto the canvas, creating images that exist somewhere between perception and invention, resulting in no two works that are the same.
Personally, I have always been a thinker and dreamer. My first overseas trip was aboard a TWA Super Constellation in 1966, from Chicago to Bombay (now Mumbai), when my mother took me to visit my grandparents. Ever since then, my imagination has returned to the question of “why” within the randomness of life’s matrix. I continue to wonder about the location of imagination, does it reside in the mind or in matter? My paintings are a constant exploration of these otherworldly and cosmic questions.
Photo by Graham W. Bell